Dead Man Talking

by Casey Daniels

  “Nah. But I know that much. I know creativity when I see it, too. You making your own clothes, that’s really cool.”

  She controlled a smile. “You think so?”

  “I think that’s more than I could ever do. It’s way more creative than Greer in that gray suit of hers.”

  “Yeah.” Sammi looked toward where we heard the sounds of genteel laughter coming from the section

  “That’s too scary to think about!”

  We shared a laugh.

  It wasn’t much, but it was a small inroad. Feeling more comfortable with Sammi than I had since she stepped out of that van and into my life, I did my best to make small talk. “You ever think of selling your clothes?” Believe me, I was in team-captain mode here, I wasn’t interested in buying. “There are some boutiques over in the Tremont neighborhood that—”

  I guess that was the wrong thing to say. Sammi grumbled a curse and walked away.

  As it turned out, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing after all. It meant I didn’t have to deal with Sammi or with introducing anybody to anybody else when Quinn showed up.

  “I thought you’d be working.”

  I gave him a look that told him I was. “Didn’t think I’d see you today.”

  “Hey, I’m a man of my word.” He was carrying a slim file folder, and he held it up for me to see.

  “Is that—”

  “The file you wanted. The Lamar case, yeah.”

  I should have been grateful. I was. Honest. But—

  “It’s awfully skinny.” I scrunched up my nose and gave the folder another look. “How can all the information about an entire murder investigation be in such a skinny folder?”

  Quinn’s expression reminded me a whole bunch of the one on Sammi’s face before she walked away. “ ‘Thank you’ might be a more appropriate response,” he said.

  “Thank you. Why is the file so skinny?”

  His lips puckered. Not in the good way they did when he kissed me. “This is what’s called the basic file,” he explained. “There’s one of these kept in the Homicide Unit for every case that’s ever been investigated. It’s not supposed to leave the Justice Center.”

  “Thank you.” This time I meant it.

  Quinn sloughed it off. “I figured no one else was going to be looking for the file. Not on a murder that old. Especially when someone was tried and convicted. You just going to stand there? Or are you going to take a look?”

  I shook away my disappointment and went to stand in the shade of the mausoleum. Quinn came along. “Basic file,” he said, flipping it open. “It tells you—”

  “The basics.”

  “That’s right. Who was murdered, when the call first came in, who was interviewed, who was convicted.”

  “I know who was convicted.” I leaned closer for a better look. Not such a bad thing, considering that Quinn was wearing Flavio aftershave, my favorite. When he left my apartment that morning, he was dressed in the navy suit he’d worn to dinner the night before. But he must have stopped home somewhere along the way. His suit was one I’d never seen before. Grey, with pinstripes that were far more subtle than the ones on the suit that Lamar wore. His French-cuffed shirt was a shade of blue that matched the sky overhead, his dusty blue tie was a box pattern of darker and lighter blues, tans, and gray.

  I leaned a little nearer. “You got this file for me fast.”

  One corner of his mouth pulled into a smile. “Told you I was a man of my word. You wanted what you wanted, I wanted what I wanted, and once I got it . . .”

  I knew better than to go down that road. The last

  That was not the kind of publicity the restoration needed, and it would certainly make my favorite Homicide detective less than happy. With that in mind, I took the folder out of his hands and read it over.

  “The victim was Vera Blaine. She was twenty-two.” Seeing the information laid out in black and white made me queasy. “He never told me who was killed, or mentioned that she was so young.”

  “He?”

  I shook myself out of my thoughts and found Quinn with his head cocked, studying me.

  “He. The guy who filled out the papers in Lamar’s cemetery file. You know, the ones that mentioned that Lamar might have been wrongly accused. I just assumed it was a he. And look”—changing the subject was a much better tactic that getting fixated on the fact that my information was coming from the dead guy who’d been convicted of the murder—“it says she was killed at the Lake View Motel in Cleveland. Ever hear of the place?”

  Quinn shook his head. “I only hang around in places where there’s trouble. Maybe no one’s been killed there lately.”

  “Or maybe the place doesn’t exist anymore.” I read over the address. Even I knew it wasn’t the best part of town. “Twenty-five years is a long time. The motel is probably gone.”

  I read the next section of the report. “It looks like the

  “And it also says that there’s not one shred of doubt that your guy, Jefferson Lamar, committed the murder. See?” Quinn had obviously been through the file before he came to Monroe Street. He knew what he was looking for. “Lamar didn’t have an alibi. Not one he could substantiate, anyway. The victim worked for him at the Central State Correctional Facility. She was his secretary.”

  “Which doesn’t mean he killed her.”

  “Of course not.” He took the file out of my hand and flipped to the second page. “But all this does. Look: it’s a list of the evidence. They had him dead to right. Lamar’s personal weapon was used in the shooting. His fingerprints were on it. His blood was on her blouse.”

  None of which Lamar had ever mentioned.

  “Still, there was that note in the cemetery file. The one about Lamar being framed.” There were only those two pieces of paper in the file, but I turned them both over, just in case I’d missed something. “There must be more information somewhere. What about crime scene photos? And the gun itself? If Lamar says he was framed—” I offered an apologetic smile. “If that note in his file says he was framed, there must be a reason somebody thinks he was framed. How can I find out more?”

  “This isn’t enough? If all you’re looking for is information about the crime so you can make your team look good—”

  “I am. I will. But wouldn’t it be even more interesting if it turned out that note in the file was right? What if Lamar really was innocent? If we could prove that, we’d really look good in the competition.”

  “If you could prove that . . .” Quinn snatched the file folder back from me. “That would mean you’d have to

  “That I might piss someone off. Big time.” I swallowed the sour taste in my mouth that came with the realization. “That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t at least look into it.”

  “That’s exactly what it means.”

  “But, Quinn . . .” He was about to walk away, which is why I pulled out all the stops and added a playful little purr to my voice. “You know what you got for getting me the basic file. Imagine if you got the real file for me, the whole thing, you know, with the photos and the interviews and—”

  “All of that is in some storage room somewhere.”

  “Which means I’ll be even more impressed if you can get your hands on it.”

  He didn’t have a chance to tell me he would—or wouldn’t—try. Greer’s not-so-soothing voice rang through the section, calling Team Number Two over for the big meet-the-other-team scene. Before I could tell Quinn we’d talk about Lamar’s file again, he was gone, and my teammates and I were being ordered around by Greer.

  Walk, talk, smile, stop. Approach Team One. Introduce yourselves. No, that’s not good enough. Start all over again.

  Reality TV it was not.

  According to Greer, this scene would eat up approximately two minutes of air time. It took two hours to shoot, and by the time it was done, even Team One, in their straw hats and flowing garden dresses, looked a little wilted.

  “We’re going to break for lunch.” I
took the bull by the horns and made the announcement, and though Greer opened her mouth to object, Team One didn’t give her a

  I wanted to be alone, see, because I was hoping if I was, Jefferson Lamar would make an appearance.

  As soon as everyone was gone, he did. He popped up out of nowhere right next to Absalom’s voodoo altar. “Do you have anything new on the case?”

  “I sure do. I saw the file. Looks like you’re as guilty as hell.”

  His jaw went rigid.

  “Facts are facts,” I told him. “And speaking of facts . . .” Being careful not to reach into the weeds before I looked to make sure there was nothing in there that was going to surprise me or gross me out, I went for the box.

  Only it wasn’t there.

  “Somebody stole it!” I said, before I realized Lamar had no idea what I was talking about. I filled him in. “Do you know who buried the box? Do you know who took it?”

  His lips thinned. “You are working with the criminal element.”

  “Oh, come on. That’s my team. They wouldn’t—” Only I remembered how Reggie and Delmar had fought over the box, and how Sammi had commented that if the coin inside it was valuable, she wanted a share in the profits. I thought about how busy we’d all been in the last couple hours, and how in that time, anyone could have taken the box out of the weeds. It was small enough to hide, and with Greer bossing us around and moving

  My shoulders sagged. “You didn’t see—”

  Lamar shook his head.

  “Great.” I dropped onto a low headstone next to Lamar’s. “We had something that made us look good, and now it’s gone. And maybe that box had something to do with your case.” I was hoping this would spark a response from Lamar, but he simply shrugged.

  “There was a coin in it.”

  “Really?” His eyes lit. “I used to collect coins.”

  Now we were getting somewhere. I sat up. “This one was silver, with the head of a lady on it.”

  “Sounds like a silver dollar. But as to who would bury it at my grave or why . . .” Another shrug.

  “Well, things aren’t looking good,” I told him. “Maybe that silver dollar was a clue of some sort, but it doesn’t matter now that it’s gone. And as far as that file Quinn got for me . . . it’s no wonder you were convicted. They had enough evidence to bury you.”

  I hadn’t meant it as a pun; even I winced.

  Lamar was as stone-faced as ever. “I told you I was framed. Otherwise, the evidence wouldn’t have been that perfect. Not if it wasn’t planted.”

  “Then we’re right back where we started.” I threw my hands in the air. “Who did it?”

  “A warden makes a lot of enemies.”

  “Yeah. Right.” Too restless to sit still, I got up and walked over to his grave. It was the first time I was able to take a closer look. The headstone was gray granite. LAMAR was prominently carved at the top with JEFFERSON in smaller letters below it and to the left, as well as the dates 1933-1985. To the right, it said HELEN, along with the birth date of 1936. There was no death date listed.

  “Helen? She’s your wife?”

  Lamar nodded.

  “And she’s not—”

  “No, she hasn’t passed.”

  “And does she think you’re guilty?”

  He flinched as if he’d been slapped.

  “All right then.” My mind made up, I brushed my hands together and headed out for lunch. “A warden makes a lot of enemies, huh? Then we won’t waste our time going down that road. Not yet. We’ll start with the one person who wasn’t your enemy.”

  5

  My restoration plan (such as it was) called for us to spend the rest of that week documenting who was buried where in our section. Yes, I know that sounds easy, but believe me, this was one plan that looked better on paper than it did in real life.

  For one thing, there were massive problems with Monroe Street itself. (I mean, in addition to the fact that it was a cemetery and that in the best of all possible worlds, I wouldn’t have been anywhere near there in the first place.) Headstones were toppled, names were misspelled in the cemetery records, and while the old, hand-drawn maps we’d been given showed graves where none existed, they didn’t show a bunch of the gravesites we found.

  And then there was the garbage.

  Good thing we were done filming for the week. Even

  Which didn’t mean I was going to sit back and do nothing. I promised myself a deep conditioning when I got home, and on Saturday afternoon, I headed out to talk to Helen Lamar.

  Within twenty minutes of leaving my apartment, I was in the city’s Tremont neighborhood. It was the area I’d mentioned to Sammi earlier that week, and as I cruised around looking for the address listed in the phone book, I saw some of the boutiques I’d talked about and she’d ignored. Not that I was taking that personally or anything. If the girl wanted to turn her back on a career in fashion and be a batterer on house arrest for the rest of her life, that was her business.

  Mine was getting to the bottom of Jefferson Lamar’s mystery, and with that in mind, I concentrated on my driving. Tremont is one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, and every once in a while, somebody gets it into their head to revitalize it. This was one of those times. Great boutiques stood side by side with trendy restaurants and bars, abandoned buildings, brand-spanking-new condos, and hundred-year-old homes that ranged from Victorian mansions to workers’ cottages.

  Helen Lamar lived not far from Lincoln Park, the couple blocks’ worth of greenery that is the center of the neighborhood. Her house was one of those blue-collar cottages, small and neat, with steps that led up to a porch that ran along the side of the house. The yard was tiny and immaculate. It was surrounded by a cyclone fence

  I’d already decided what I was going to say to Helen, so when a tiny woman with cropped gray hair and wearing white shorts, an orange T-shirt, and yellow flip flops opened the door, I was ready for her. I’d brought along one of the five hundred business cards Ella had made for me when I started my job at Garden View. Since I didn’t usually want anyone to know where I worked, I had plenty, so I didn’t mind giving one away. Besides, I was hoping the card made me look official.

  “Monroe Street. Yes, I know.”

  The uncertainty in her eyes shifted to wariness. As if she thought I’d brought along an army of thugs and was planning a home invasion, she looked beyond me.

  “I work at Garden View. As a tour guide.” I brought her attention back to the matter at hand by tapping one broken fingernail to the words printed on my card. “This summer, we’re participating in a restoration project at Monroe Street. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I’m doing research, see, and the section I’m working in—”

  “Is where Jeff is buried.” She might be elderly, but Helen was obviously as sharp as a tack. She followed my long-winded explanation to its logical conclusion, weighing the card in one hand while she gave me another once-over. “If you’re looking for information so you can sensationalize the whole thing—”

  She thought about it for a moment before she gestured

  While she was gone, I settled myself and got out the legal pad I’d brought along for notes. By the time she was back, I was ready for her. She, it seemed, was ready for me, too.

  “If you want someone to tell you the police knew what they were doing and that they did the right thing, you’ve come to the wrong place,” she said. She poured iced tea, her voice as old-lady pleasant as ever. But hey, I’m no dummy. I didn’t fail to catch the iron undertone in her words. “Jeff was innocent.”

  “That’s what he—” I drowned my impulsive comment with a gulp of iced tea. It was made from powered mix and too sweet, and I choked, gagged, and swallowed. “I thought if I talked to you, I’d get the other side of the story,” I said. “I thought—”

  “Why?”

  There was the whole thing about the competition, of course, so I could have started my explanation there. I would have, if Helen hadn’t pu
t down the iced tea pitcher and leaned forward in the rocker, her elbows on her thighs, her fingers steepled beneath her chin. Those blue eyes of hers just about flashed a challenge at me.

  In real life, I am not a dishonest person. But more often than not when it comes to ghosts, I find myself not just stretching the truth, but ignoring it altogether. I mean, can anyone blame me? That doesn’t explain why, this time, I opted for honesty. Mostly.

  “There’s a note in the cemetery records. I don’t know who left it. It says there was some doubt about Mr. Lamar’s guilt.”

  “You still do.”

  She hadn’t touched her iced tea. Now, she picked up her glass and held it between the palms of her hands. The glass was sweaty but she didn’t seem to mind, not even when a drop of condensation trickled through her fingers.

  She stared at her hands. “It won’t bring him back.”

  “But if we could clear his name—”

  She stopped me cold with a look. “Why do you care?”

  I set my glass down on top of a copy of the morning’s newspaper that was on a table next to the couch. “There’s a competition involved with the restoration. We’re going to be on TV. The show premiers tomorrow night.”

  She was not as impressed as I hoped. In fact, she wasn’t impressed at all.

  Like I could blame her?

  “So you don’t care. Not really.”

  “I care because I want to win. Because it’s going to be on TV, and a few people might actually see it. The other team is made up of garden club ladies, see, and I’ve got these prisoners on parole. Or probation. Or whatever. And—”

  “But you don’t really care. Not about Jeff.”

  Did I? I didn’t want to. Believe me when I say this: I did so not want to care. But I did. I do. Partly because like all the ghosts I’d met, Lamar had sucked me into

  Well, mostly because it just wasn’t fair the way the ghosts I’d met had been murdered. I mean, let’s face it, that’s just lousy luck, and an awful way to die. In Lamar’s case, things weren’t any better. In fact, I suspected they were worse. Jefferson Lamar struck me as the kind of guy who didn’t like the world to think of him as a killer, and these days (except for Helen, of course), that was pretty much the only thing anyone remembered about him.